Disappearing the Uighurs

China's been attacking both Christian and Muslim groups quite a bit lately, though the mosques you here of here being destroyed seem to date from earlier times than the churches that I've heard of being destroyed:

(As an aside: One of the scarier results following that recent shooting in New Zealand were these poll results reported by a Taiwanese journalist - how to best interpret them is a bit tough though - as you probably should factor in the conflict between the PRC and Taiwan. how the news might have been reported there, and censorship pressuresamongst other things).

It made me think of places like Benin City in what's now Nigeria:

The Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) described the walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom as the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era. According to estimates by the New Scientist’s Fred Pearce, Benin City’s walls were at one point “four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops”.

... Now, however, the great Benin City is lost to history. Its decline began in the 15th century, sparked by internal conflicts linked to the increasing European intrusion and slavery trade at the borders of the Benin empire. Then in 1897, the city was destroyed by British soldiers – looted, blown up and burnt to the ground.

In this case the people have survived, but much of the history has been lost, not just physically but also from the memory of most. It's not just in Africa (and in Africa not just Benin City) where this sort of thing has happened - e.g. the Anglo-Saxon takeover of what's now the UK (itself discussed in the context of missing Indian history):

... in the space of less than 200 years the Celtic Britons of what became England abandoned their native language and cultural memory and replaced it with that of pagan Germans. We know from both fine-scale modern genetic analysis of the British Isles, as well as ancient DNA, that the majority of the ancestry of the modern English dates to the period before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons. And yet pre-Germanic language and cultural folkways had only a trivial impact on the English. Even royal houses, such as those of Wessex, who were likely of native British origin (the earlier rulers in the genealogy have Celtic forenames!) “retconned” their origin to be from the Germanic god Wotan.

How much are the Uighurs likely to remember of their history a century or two in the future? I just don't know.